Charter airline that deports Black asylum-seekers slammed for tweet claiming to honor MLK

Author Sarah Towle noted here at Daily Kos how Omni Air “has been the only charter airline” willing to carry out lengthy deportation flights of vulnerable African asylum-seekers to regions including Cameroon. Like previously noted, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cruelly carried out the deportation of some Black asylum-seekers on the first day of Black History Month last year.

“Omni’s human cargo are enchained, always, in five-point restraints—hands and ankles cuffed in thick metal bracelets and attached to a heavy waist chain—for the duration of their forced ‘repatriation,’” Towle wrote. African asylum-seekers have described in a civil rights complaint how they’ve been left shrieking in pain after being restrained in a “WRAP,” some for a part of the deportation, some for all of it.

Towle notes in the diary that “after taking off from Fort Worth’s Alliance Field, Omni’s November flight to Luanda, Angola lasted 34 hours and 40 minutes.”

“Even without cuffs and chains, the flights to Cameroon were particularly egregious,” Towle continues. “Previously targeted for persecution by Cameroon’s majority Francophone government because of their Anglophone social group membership, these asylum seekers were sent directly back to certain harm—a violation of the international principle of non-refoulement.”

The American Prospect described in one Nov. 2020 report how one Cameroonian asylum-seeker, “G.N.,” was shackled and deported by ICE and Omni Air despite having a case still under appeal. Upon landing in Cameroon, G.N. was arrested by police. “They brought him to Yaoundé, where they detained him for six days and beat him,” the report said. “He was released when his uncle paid a $1,000 bribe, he said. The prison authorities denied his arrest, abuse, and bribe claims.”

Others on Twitter noted how Omni Air pocketed huge sums of pandemic relief aid, nearly $70 million worth. That $67 million in relief “came on the heels of a $77.65 million contract with the Department of Defense for ‘international charter airlift services,’” Yahoo News reported in 2020. That report notes that the former president as a candidate campaigned in an airport hanger owned by Air Transport Services Group. ATSG owns, you guessed it, Omni Air.

Towle notes that Omni Air helped ICE carry out the cruel deportation of Haitian asylum-seekers under the debunked Title 42 policy, “facilitating ‘the largest mass deportation campaign in 5 decades with 154 removal flights to Haiti, up from 37 in 2020, that expelled over 15,000 Haitians,’ according to Thomas Cartwright, who tracks ICE-Air flight for Witness at the Border. That’s 15,000 men, women, and children expulsed to a country roiled by chaos and gang rule just as 20,000 Afghans facing similar pressures found refuge in the US.”